20150725無私之愛啟光明 Bringing Light to Syrian Children with Selfless Love
Climate changes are truly very extreme. Such extreme climate brings disasters around the world, especially for the Gaza Strip. After homes are damaged by the continuous fighting and now with scorching heat, where can people live? They still live in tents and suffer in the aftermath. Thinking about their hardship, especially when power restoration is hard, how much hardship they live with.
Indeed, many people in the world are truly in pain and suffering. Yet, love can patch up the suffering. Yesterday, I had three special visitors from Turkey. He were accompanied by our volunteers in Turkey, Mr. Faisal Hu and his wife, and a Taiwanese businessman who travels often to Turkey for business.
One of the visitors was Professor Cuma. It was because of him that Mr. Hu was able to carry out Tzu Chi’s charity work to help the Syrian refugees.
With Professor Cuma’s help, they visited the former deputy mayor who then connected us to an official in the Ministry of National Education. The three visitors have a very loving heart and are devoted Muslims. At Yesterday’s meeting, when these three strong men, but soft hearted, described how the refugees escaped Syria and their current hardship in Turkey, they were in tears.
Especially when they talked about the Syrian children, they expressed their sincerity and hope after working with Tzu Chi. They kept saying thanks to Taiwan and to Tzu Chi and too many Tzu Chi volunteers in Chinese. The official of Ministry of National Education and the deputy mayor kept on reiterating their gratitude.
However, there are so many more Syrian refugees in need of help in Turkey. How I wish that we can help everyone in need. Unfortunately, there is a limit to what we can do. It will become a huge problem in the future of those Syrian children do not go to school.
So, I have been thinking about how to solve this problem. Not long after, I met Faisal and Prof. Cuma, who are also trying to help Syrian children to go back to school. This school is my life. I want to devote my soul and life to this school. This school means a second chance of life for the students.
They hope they can help at least 2,000 children to receive education. That’s their wish. However, either at the border or in the cities, tens of thousands Syrian children become refugees after arriving in Turkey. The suffering is truly unbearable for these refugees.
Their major problem now is no money to pay daily expenses, no money to see a doctor, to buy food and to pay rent.
Every family is a large family. However, fleeting home left them with nothing. After arriving in
Turkey, they have a very hard time finding work. Their children, age seven and above, work to support their family.
Seven years old! Here in Taiwan, children at the age of seven are being looked after very carefully. In Turkey, Syrian refugees’ children already have to work to support their family. A family of ten may have to depend on two children, seven, nine or eleven years old, to go to work to support the family.
These children cannot afford going to school like other local children, not officially. They can only make most of their afternoons or evenings to study. They can only learn basic reading and writing. It is very sad to hear this. They broke into tears as well. Three of four grown up men were all in tears.
They really like to do something to help, but they feel very powerless about it. Currently, for the families that we are helping, we provide them four cash cards per month. Each cash card has a value of 25 Turkish liras.
So each month, Tzu Chi gives 100 Turkish liras to each family to support them. Prof. Cuma was very touched that, one day at an aid distribution. He mentioned Tzu Chi started its charity mission with coin banks donations.
After he told the story about how Tzu Chi began, he then asked people who came to collect the aid: “Can you donate one Turkish lira to help others? People in Taiwan started to give their love by donating fifty cents to help people in need. Now, the aid that we receive comes from the love of people in Taiwan, which started with 50 cents donation. Raise your hand if you can donate one Turkish lira.”
He shared with me yesterday that, beyond his imagination everyone raised their hand. Volunteers went around and collected their donation. Besides one lira, some donated two liras, some five liras, so on and so forth. Mr. Hu said: “At the time, I did not have a coin bank to collect their donations. I just used my hands.” He counted, and the total was more than 1,000 liras, enough for hardship assistance to 20 families.
Lira by lira, donation came in. He told the audience: This is a Tzu Chi experience how Tzu Chi starts with 50 cents donations. Here and now, by pooling everyone’s one lira together, we have enough to aid 20 more families in hardship. If there is love, there is a way to help.
After relieving of their suffering, we share with them the Dharma and hope they can truly heal from this ordeal and realize that religion is about utmost sincere love, and people should be thankful to one another. Yesterday, they expressed their gratitude many times.
Now, they’ve learned about Tzu Chi’s coin banks and are promoting doing good deeds and filial piety through coin banks.
The small coin bank is for children to save their coins in every day. At the end of the month, they can give that money to their parents. The big coin bank is for everyone in the family to save money to do good deeds. This is what they are promoting in Turkey now.
With everyone’s help, they hope to raise funds locally to help the Syrian refugees in Turkey. Of course, with Tzu Chi Taiwan being the headquarter to lead the way, we also have to provide what support we can so that they’ll have enough resources to carry out charity work there and inspire love in people.
Truly, with the power of love, people can work together with a common goal of helping the Syrian refugees.
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